Tanner, According to Those Who Knew Him Best

A Self-Taught Texan

To chronicle his compelling life, Sherdog.com turned to some of the
people who knew him best, including those who grew up with him and
watched him wrestle in high school before he began his fight career
inside a rowdy rodeo coliseum in Amarillo, Texas.

A Self-Taught Texan

Deana Epperson grew up across the street from Tanner in Amarillo
and kept in touch with him throughout the years: He was a good
kid. He really didn’t mess with anybody. He didn’t even wrestle --
he pole-vaulted in junior high. He didn’t even start wrestling
until our sophomore year in high school, and we were a big school.
We were 5A. By our junior and senior year, he was a back-to-back
state champion in wrestling. Texas is no joke with wrestling and
for him to have never wrestled till 10th grade and then been a
state champion in 11th and 12th grade -- that’s just
incredible.

He was such a renaissance man on the most basic level. He didn’t
really like to admit this to people, but Evan had a photographic
memory, and that’s how the big legend of Evan Tanner was true. He
was a big wrestler in high school and he got the Gracie jiu-jitsu
videos, and whatever he would watch somebody do, he could instantly
put that into his repertoire. He was genetically gifted, he was
amazingly smart, and he remembered everything he read and saw. That
really explains how a guy who never really went to a dojo till he
was 21 was able to do what he did.

He was the first one I ever saw grab wrists to reign down elbows.
And later on I saw Tito Ortiz in
the corner with one of his fighters yelling, “Tanner elbows! Tanner
elbows!” That’s when you know you’re the s---, is when someone is
referencing you when they’re cornering someone else.

Jason Leigh met Tanner after a USWF event and was friends with
him for the decade that followed: If Evan didn’t know how to do
something, he would get a book and read it and do it. I watched him
basically re-plumb his house. I asked where he learned to do it,
and he pointed to a book on the table -- “How to Plumb Your
House.”

Paul
Buentello, a veteran heavyweight who fought Tanner in 1997:
I came up right behind him in high school. He never passed himself
off as the baddest dude in the school. He was so quiet you didn’t
even know he was there. You would always see him on the other side
of the schoolyard. He was always bundled up, whether it was winter
or in the dead of summer. He always wore a beanie and a sweater. He
was always cutting weight. He liked to be alone, do his own thing.
Every time he wrestled, he pretty much had the place full.

Kit
Cope, a UFC veteran: I remember when I first met him up at
the gym to start training. I was holding the pads for him, and it
was the most awkward thing. The timing was off, and we couldn’t
jive at first because he was completely unorthodox. And I mean
completely unorthodox, like he was throwing punches from the
wrong angles, with the wrong speed, with the wrong tells, with the
wrong hip movements and everything.

I finally asked him where he learned his muay Thai, and then he
tells me this story -- and I don’t know if everybody knows this or
if I was the only person who didn’t know this -- but he lived in a
cabin up in the boonies. And I mean he was in the boonies where he
ran everything off of a generator. He self-taught himself how to
fight in his one-room cabin with a VCR and some tapes and some
books. Seriously! And that guy literally made it all the way into
the UFC and won the title!

He was completely self-taught until he got into the UFC (and)
started training with Team Quest. I knew that’s why everything
looked different because he, well, made everything up. His entire
fighting style he made up taking scraps from books and VHS tapes.
The end result was that (his style) was the most awkward thing.
Like when he would throw his jab, it would have four different
kinks, but it would end up in the right spot. Even funnier, the
first few times we did light sparring, I got hit with
everything. Literally everything because I had never seen it
thrown like that before.

Scott Holmes, a Sherdog.com radio host and contributor, watched
Tanner’s April 1997 MMA debut in Amarillo and followed him through
the ranks of the USWF and into the UFC: These were very, very
raucous crowds in Amarillo. Lots of beer drinking. It was on a
rodeo dirt floor. A mat constructed on a dirt floor, and there were
more fights in the crowd than there was on the card. This was one
of those no air-conditioning (arenas) set up for livestock to be
traded around. You got chairs on a dirt floor, and quite often guys
would get into fights as they walked to the ring. Back then you
didn’t back down … you went into the crowd. It was that kind of a
venue. The majority of the people in the audience, 95 percent, had
no idea what they were coming to see.

I ran into another friend of mine who was an all-state wrestler and
just asked him casually who he thought would win. He said Evan
Tanner. When I heard the name -- he was legendary, from a rival
high school, a wrestling badass -- we knew who Evan was. Evan
looked every part a fighter, and he took apart everybody.